Since his brush with political death, Gordon Brown has made ‘candour’ his word for the month. So it was extraordinary to hear how brazenly the Prime Minister distorted the truth in his address on Tuesday to the GMB’s conference in Blackpool: a thunderous campaign speech which sought to draw the sharpest of ‘dividing lines’ between virtuous Labour and wicked Conservatives.
Using the age-old New Labour technique of the anecdotal case study, Mr Brown congratulated his government for saving the life of ‘a woman called Diane’ who had written to him to thank him, he said, for ensuring ‘that there is proper breast screening in the National Health Service’. Yet the PM somehow neglected to mention how appallingly patchy screening remains for women aged 50 to 70 and how coverage for screening of those aged between 50 and 64 actually declined between 2001 and 2008. He scorned the supposed Conservative dogma ‘that says that you must cut public services in order to fund inheritance tax for the richest people in this country’ — apparently forgetting that he himself bounced Alistair Darling into increasing the allowances for inheritance tax in October 2007 in a panicked response to George Osborne’s popular proposals to allow us to hand more of our wealth on to our children.
Above all, he warned again and again of the prospective ghastliness of a ‘Conservative government bringing in 10 per cent cuts in our public services… We must expose those people who would impose 10 per cent cuts… In two years’ time if we do not act and do not wake up to the problems that will be faced by a Conservative government cutting public expenditure by 10 per cent, then many of these services would be going or gone.’ As Fraser Nelson points out on page 10, this is dishonesty of the highest order. The Tories would indeed introduce cuts, as Mr Osborne readily admitted in a Times article on Monday — and rightly so. But so too, according to their own published figures, would the Labour government after April 2011.
Mr Darling, the still-Chancellor, concedes that economies are on the way. ‘I have always been clear,’ he told the Financial Times on 12 June, ‘that, just as we support the economy now, in the medium term we have got to live within our means and I set out a clear commitment to halve the deficit over a five-year period.’ But the PM and Ed Balls — the man Brown wanted to supplant Darling at the Treasury — persist with the Lie Direct. Labour ‘invests’, the Tories ‘cut’. That was the message that won the 2001 and 2005 elections, they believe: why should it not bring victory again in 2010? Like the Bourbons, the Brownites have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
It was an article of faith for the Tory modernisers when David Cameron became leader in 2005 that the party would stick to Labour spending plans — initially, at least. That pledge was a necessary part of the so-called ‘decontamination’ process: Mr Cameron’s highly successful strategy to persuade swing voters that Conservative motives are benign. But there are good reasons, post-crash, to pursue a quite different approach — as the shadow chancellor is indeed doing.
First, it is authentically Conservative. As Dr Johnson rightly said, ‘a Tory does not wish to give more real power to government’. So a Conservative administration should always have a predisposition to rein in public spending rather than to increase it.
Second, it is honest. The voters know that the country is horribly in debt, and they do not like it. That is not to say that the public is clamouring for spending cuts. But — since there must be belt-tightening — it is self-evidently preferable that the work be done by honest policy-makers rather than dishonest propagandists. The coming election will be about competence, but it will also be about character. Cameron and Osborne are right to treat the voters as adults — and Brown and Balls are wrong to think that Labour will not pay a price this time for treating us all as fools.
Comments